Their conversations spark with the strange, associative leaps made by all children and artists, making the two an odd but perfect fit. She is still in grade school, longing for more attention from her single mother, while he, already well into his 80s, is a capricious former jingle writer and solitary figure of fascination. All across the country, people felt they’d really won.”įlashbacks give us the moment when Daniel and Elisabeth first meet in the mid-90s.

All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. “All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. Of the June referendum, which signaled the United Kingdom’s split with the European Union, she writes: In a masterful early passage that echoes A Tale of Two Cities, Smith captures the fractious political climate of post-Brexit Britain. Elisabeth, a plucky thirty-something art lecturer, reads to him from Huxley, Shakespeare, and Dickens. The novel opens on an elderly Daniel sleeping at a nursing home. Like all of Smith’s work, the book ranges formally and thematically, touching on everything from pop art to Brexit. The first in a cycle of books named after the four seasons, Autumn addresses an unlikely friendship between next door neighbors Daniel and Elisabeth. Her latest effort, Autumn, is no exception. From internet subversive George in How to Be Both to the formally contrarian academic lectures collected in Artful, Smith’s body of work exemplifies what a rigorous negotiation between politics and aesthetics can look like. Whatever walls critics throw up-between fiction and non-fiction, between present and past, between art and politics-she dismantles them all with glee. Of all novelists working today, Ali Smith is perhaps the least interested in boundaries. The state is not the beginning, end, or the reason for this space.” Rather, Livingstone argues, such an aesthetic space is a site of constant negotiation, one that necessitates porous boundaries and a wily slipperiness.

“In this aesthetic space, the arts explore a less confined politics than the one that controls the state. What’s the use of writing your novel-or even writing about novels-while the US government’s current administration attacks the rights of its citizens?Įarlier this month, New Republic c ultural critic Jo Livingstone ventured a provisional response to this question, suggesting artists and critics must carve out a space for dissent and play that is not beholden to the body politic.

Since November’s election, American writers have exhibited a collective anxiety about the utility of creativity under Trump.

Ali smith autumn review